Data Point of the Week: 83% of Industrial Companies Interested in AR

Data Point of the Week is ARtillry’s weekly dive into data from around the XR universe. Spanning usage and market-sizing data, it’s meant to draw insights for XR players, or would-be entrants. To see an indexed archive of data briefs and slide bank, subscribe to ARtillry Pro.

There’s lots of talk of AR’s potential and broad applicability in the enterprise, including our reports. But these early stages are all about proof points. We’re seeing lots of pilot programs, the results (and subsequent adoption) of which could be revealed in the next 12-18 months.

One of the challenges for enterprise AR adoption is enterprises themselves. Though few people doubt the ROI advantages (e.g. cost & error reduction in industrial settings), it’s still tough to break through organizational resistance, red tape and risk aversion.

But meanwhile there are signs of interest from enterprises. In a recent survey of industrial enterprises, Toshiba revealed 83 percent interest in AR deployment in the next 3 years. That’s 89 percent for engineering, 83 percent for logistics, and 77 percent for manufacturing.

This is promising but should be taken with its appropriate salt tonnage. In the aforementioned enterprise challenges, the friction usually isn’t in the interest level but in the deployment. As we’ve examined, it requires the buy-in at all levels, especially at end-user and grassroots levels.

But perhaps more telling that “aspirational” sentiments of survey respondents is the proof points of current deployments. As a teaser for a feature we’ll run later this week on Scope AR, it recently demonstrated up to 99 percent efficiency gains for Lockheed Martin and other clients.

These are positive signs, which is what AR needs. We believe this momentum will continue to build towards a tipping point for enterprise adoption sometime in the 2020 timeframe (figures above). Similar to enterprise smartphone adoption, it will build slow then happen fast.